Amazon is reportedly experimenting with a hand-based biometric payments scheme that could be introduced at select Whole Foods locations as early as next year. The news comes courtesy of the New York Post, which cites sources working at Amazon’s New York City offices. According to those sources, the new solution (which has been codenamed Orville)…
Amazon is claiming that it can see fear thanks to improvements to its Rekognition facial recognition platform. The latest update introduces more accurate gender and age identification. It will also be better at reading people’s emotions based on their facial characteristics, adding fear to a list that already includes happy, sad, angry, surprised, disgusted, calm,…
The Orlando Police Department is giving up on its trial deployment of Amazon’s Rekognition platform, once again ending its on again/off again relationship with the tech giant. The facial recognition tech was supposed to be part of a surveillance pilot that would allow the OPD to track suspicious individuals through the city in real time.…
Amazon is facing a potential class action lawsuit due to its recording policies with Alexa. According to a report in The Seattle Times, the lawsuit was filed in Seattle on behalf of a ten-year-old girl in Massachusetts, and alleges that the tech giant has been illegally recording the conversations of children without the consent of…
Apple’s introduction of the face-scanning Face ID system in 2017’s iPhone X went a long way in helping to make facial recognition for authentication a mainstream technology among consumers. But it was Amazon that really made facial recognition for large-scale public identification explode into the national discourse as an ethical issue, after an ACLU report…
Amazon is hoping to raise accountability and reduce fraud with a new policy that requires Amazon Flex delivery drivers to take a selfie to confirm their identity. The new requirement specifically applies to Amazon Flex drivers working as independent contractors, who make deliveries with their personal vehicles. This is not the first time that a…
Thanks to improvements in digital imaging and data storage, medical archives are much larger than they’ve ever been. Researchers now have access to millions of MRIs, X-Rays, and other images that they can analyze to better understand, diagnose, and treat any number of medical conditions. The catch is that doctors need to be able…
Amazon is now calling for government regulation of facial recognition technology, even as it defends sales of its own such technology to law enforcement authorities. In a new post on the Amazon Web Services Machine Learning blog, the company’s VP of Global Public Policy, Michael Punke, writes, “We support the calls for an appropriate national…
The inaugural MIT AI Policy Congress recently convened in Massachusetts, bringing together leading researchers, industry insiders, and policy experts for a series of discussions about the future of artificial intelligence. Hosted by MIT’s Internet Policy Research Initiative (IPRI) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the conversation stressed the importance of collaboration and…
“By targeting three of the world’s biggest tech companies, the letters could help to focus attention on the issue.” A coalition of 85 advocacy and activist groups have signed open letters urging Amazon, Google, and Microsoft to pledge not to sell facial recognition technology to government authorities. Signatories include the American Civil Liberties Union, the…
The results are in for the latest FindBiometrics Year in Review Survey, with at least some of them confirming the biggest trends observed over the course of 2018. And this can be seen clearly in the responses to Question Three of the survey in particular, which asked, “From your perspective, which biometric modality has been…
A newly published patent application from Amazon outlines a smart doorbell designed to use facial recognition for a kind of technologically-enhanced neighborhood watch. The essential idea is to let users add suspicious individuals to a watch list, which is shared by a given community network based on connected houses using the biometric doorbell system. When…
Facial recognition technology has had a big year, in good ways and bad. On the positive side, Apple signaled a more or less definitive switch to 3D facial recognition as the primary mechanism for user authentication on its flagship smartphones: Having made a big splash last year with its introduction of Face ID on the…
“A key component of the GMCNgine is Rekognition, Amazon’s controversial computer vision platform.” Facial recognition technology’s growing role in the fight against child exploitation could see a substantial expansion after the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children’s launch of a new AI-driven system this week. Called the GMCNgine, the system leverages machine learning and artificial…
Amazon is seeking to get its Alexa virtual assistant into more third party devices with the announcement that it has now opened up the SDK for its Alexa Mobile Accessory Kit. The development platform was first announced near the start of the year, when it was available for select headphone devices from Bose, Jabra, and…
At a time of heightened controversy around government use of facial recognition technology, Trueface is laying out its own ethical guidelines for ‘responsibly deployed facial recognition’. Writing in a Medium post, Trueface CEO Shaun Moore groups his firm’s ethos under three main headings. The first, and perhaps most important, is “Humanity First”, a reference to…
It has been another remarkable year for the biometrics industry, with a lot of activity across a wide range of sectors. Apple, which spearheaded the mobile biometrics revolution with its launch of Touch ID five years ago, went ahead and confirmed its shift to 3D facial recognition with the launch of three new iPhones featuring…
“After an ACLU report revealed that Amazon had been selling facial recognition technology to police earlier this year, an assortment of privacy rights activists, shareholders, and even Amazon employees publicly decried the practice and called on the company to stop. “ Amazon is showing no sign of backing off from its marketing and sales of…
Two Canadian credit unions are now testing a system that lets customers do their banking through Alexa, Amazon’s voice-based virtual assistant. The technology comes by way of Vancouver-based FinTech specialist Central 1, which developed it in collaboration with San Francisco design agency Point One Digital. Essentially, the idea is to make Alexa a customer service…